The Mystery of Jim Braden: A Man of Many Names – how was he tied to J.F.K?
Eugene Hale Brading was born into a working-class Kansas family and built a criminal résumé that stretched back to 1934.
By the time he reached middle age the record filled multiple pages: burglary, confidence schemes, numbers running, and the sale of stolen gas-ration coupons.
His specialty became wedding bunko. Partnered with a man named Victor Pierre, he repeatedly married or courted the widows of wealthy Texas oilmen, extracted large sums, and moved on.
One such scheme in 1952 brought him face to face with Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker, who banned him from the county and arrested him for vagrancy.
The widow pressed charges. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1954 on the question of a wife testifying against her husband; Brading lost and served time on Terminal Island.
He emerged in September 1963 and immediately obtained a California driver’s license and credit cards under the name Jim Braden.
Two months later he flew into Dallas on a private plane with an associate named Morgan H. Brown, a man with his own violent history who once disarmed an LAPD officer, stripped him, and forced him to dance at gunpoint before a SWAT team extracted him from his house.
The pair checked into the newly opened Cabana Motor Hotel, an upscale property whose outdoor walkways were screened by stone lattice that faced the Stemmons Freeway.
On Thursday evening, November 21, Braden and Brown met Lamar Hunt, son of the ultra-conservative oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, in the elder Hunt’s offices. The same day Lamar Hunt paid for the black-bordered newspaper advertisement that welcomed President Kennedy to Dallas in hostile language.
That night in the hotel’s Bon Vivant Room, Braden and Brown sat with Jack Ruby, Lawrence Myers, Ed Myers, and a woman named Jean WeSt. Ruby had already eaten at the Egyptian Lounge; the Myers brothers were in town partly for the Pepsi-Cola bottlers’ convention that also drew Richard Nixon.
Lawrence Myers was helping Ruby market a twist-board exercise device. Shortly after the assassination on Friday, Braden was inside the Dal-Tex Building across from the Texas School Book Depository.
He claimed he had been looking for a pay phone. The freight-elevator operator found him suspicious and summoned a deputy sheriff.
Braden produced a credit card and driver’s license in the name Jim Braden, gave a voluntary statement listing Beverly Hills and Los Angeles addresses, and was released after a couple of hours.
He returned to the Cabana to discover that Morgan Brown had already checked out. Braden flew commercially to Houston to rejoin his associates.
Federal parole records show that Braden had listed Lamar Hunt as the man he intended to meet in Dallas.
His New Orleans oil-exploration office occupied room 706 of the Pere Marquette Building; down the same hallway in room 701 attorney Ray Gill and private investigator David Ferrie worked on behalf of Carlos Marcello.
The inventory of Ferrie’s apartment later included rifles, an aerial bomb, radio equipment, and cameras.
By early 1964 Braden suddenly possessed substantial cash. He became a founding member of the La Costa Country Club, a Teamster-financed resort near Richard Nixon’s San Clemente residence.
A locker opened by a club employee once contained two hundred thousand dollars in currency.
Braden continued to write the FBI requesting his own files and lived under the Braden alias.
On the night Robert Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Braden was staying at a hotel fifteen minutes away.
ABC News managing editor Peter Noyes uncovered the dual presence and forced the LAPD’s Special Unit Senator to interview him.
Braden insisted he had remained with his wife all night. No further official action followed.
He died in Florida around 1994, reportedly still wealthy, after accumulating roughly a dozen ex-wives.
Researchers have noted that the Dal-Tex Building offered elevated lines of sight toward Dealey Plaza and that the Cabana’s lattice work faced the motorcade’s high-speed route to Parkland.
Braden’s own statement never named the person he claimed he needed to telephone. The combination of a freshly minted alias, proximity to both assassination sites, documented contact with the Hunt family and Jack Ruby, and an office adjacent to David Ferrie has kept his name circulating among those who continue to map the outer edges of the events of 1963 and 1968.
The Career Con Man Who Walked Into the Building Moments After the Shots and Walked Out Free
When a Fresh Alias and a Credit Card Unlocked the Door to Two National Tragedies
The Hustler Whose Oil Meetings and Hotel Companions Still Refuse to Fade From the Record
How One Man’s Sudden Fortune and Dual Presence Linked the Darkest Days of a Decade
The Shadow Figure Whose Path Crossed Both Killings Yet Left Only Questions and Cash Behind
Because nothing says “just in town on business” quite like a brand-new name, a private plane, and a locker full of unexplained bills.
